To be a talk-show host, to state the painfully obvious, must be a very weird experience. It is literally your job to get along with everyone you encounter, to always have to know what to say and how best to say it. Since the majority of your guests are simply there to plug their latest projects, which you may or may not check out and may or may not enjoy, you also are put into the position of having to pretend the affirmative on both of those things. I just loved your [movie/teevee show/album/book], really! Eventually, as David Letterman showed us, such a thing wears a normal person down.
The personality traits seem by definition to be heightened in the daytime arena, where the fluff is even fluffier, and the goal seems to be to provide solace and affirmation to whatever the audience is stuck spending their afternoon tuning into such a thing. Daytime hosts are the hype people for video wallpaper, essentially. And they do it with the persona of being everyone's friend.
Oprah is the queen of this sort of thing, of course, and she's very good at it. She has cemented herself in the American psyche as a goodwill ambassador, someone whose work ethic and positive attitude has transformed lives.
But she has also inflicted Doctors Oz and Phil on an unsuspecting nation, so there's that. She is tight with Tyler Perry, who poses as a champion for black artistes, while simultaneously building an empire on the backs of non-union contract workers.
So when we all saw Ellen DeGeneres sitting next to ol' Fredo Arbusto at the Cowboys-Packers game last Sunday, one instantly assumed the requisite round of side-taking and tribal affirmation. I think it does say something about Ellen, but it also says -- as these things always do -- so much more about us, and our supposed deep concerns, and how impotent online twitrage is supposed to equal some sort of constructive action or activity.
It seems that most observers, regardless of political persuasion, rate Trump as already an even worse chief executive than Bush, who was already barrel-scrapings with the likes of James Buchanan. And to be sure, it's a neck-and-wattle battle for that low spot.
But a sober assessment of Trump's track record so far, while certainly dismal, will actually compare him slightly more favorably to Bush. Even a cursory recap of the "standout" moments bear that out:
Bush has been allowed to go through some "rehabilitation" to his image because Americans are forgetful, heedless, and are always hesitant to hold their "betters" responsible for the horrors they commit or enable. And Bush has cultivated this image as more of an amiable doofus than a boorish, philandering con man like Trump.
But Bush is a dick all the same, setting aside the fake-cowboy pose and trotting out his natural to-the-manor-born attitude whenever challenged on anything. When the Iraq War started getting hairy, he dared them to bring it on, and seemed surprised when they in fact brought it. His response was to play dress-up and pretend to land a fighter on an aircraft carrier and drop a huge celebratory banner. He seemed to think that looking out the window of Air Force One over the the flooded remains of the Ninth Ward showed sufficiently that he really, truly cared.
When I talk about how Trump will almost certainly never be held fully or even partially accountable for his crimes, because we almost never do that to the wealthy and powerful, it's really George W. Bush who serves as the prime example in this era of that very principle. Read the above list of bullet points again, keeping in mind that it's been a long time, and I probably forgot a lot of other nasty shit. What price at all has Bush paid for any of it? Didn't cost him a day in jail or a dollar out of pocket. Probably never lost a wink of sleep at any point in time. Why, he's friends with America's Friend, Ellen DeGeneres!
And it's not like he hasn't done anything since he left office -- Bush resurfaced last year to do some behind-the-scenes arm-twisting for one Brett "Boof" Kavanaugh, aka Rapebro McGambledrunk. The Republicons would have pushed through some monster or other regardless, but Kavanaugh's pedigree is special -- helped Kenny Boy Starr impeach Bill Clinton over a blowjob, then served as Dubya's minion for several years, so he knows where all the bodies and documents are buried, and Bush figured he owed him one. That was just last year.
I bet you if you asked Ellen how she feels about Trump, even in public, she probably would indicate a high degree of disfavor, if not outright disgust. I'm sure she'd be even more candid in private, about the way he treats people and talks to them and about them, about the abuse of refugees, many of them children, and about the hypocritical evangelicals who openly support a morally bankrupt scumbag because he gives them their best chance to impose a theocracy on a nation that is less and less likely to to abide by that nonsense with each passing year. About anything and everything the man does and says, because it's irrefutable at this point that he's a pustulent pile of shit who is entirely unfit for the office he inhabits.
And yet. The Ellen-Dubya moment took place in the owner's box after all; Ellen had been invited by Charlotte Jones, daughter of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who contributed one million dollars to Trump's inaugural, and likely more on the side to the campaigns and down-ticket support.
Most of us out in peon-land make these little daily micro-decisions about which of our friends and relatives we're willing to discuss politics and current events with, whatever side they land on. Many people have unfortunately had to make tough decisions to stop talking even to their parents, because they can't listen to the incoherent support for an incoherent yabbo one more blessed minute.
But that is all at arm's length; none of us has any sort of direct contact with the people who actually make the decisions. We're not going to find ourselves sitting next to the Botcher of Baghdad in the owner's box anytime soon.
I don't expect Ellen DeGeneres to make a scene or pop him upside the head or whatever. I don't expect anything at all from her, or from anyone in her position. I'm sure they didn't discuss anything political at all; by their very status of power and wealth and cultural influence, neither Ellen DeGeneres nor George W. Bush really need to worry about politics at all. The decisions made by Fuckface Von Clownstick or Boof O'Kavanaugh will not affect either of them in the slightest. They are at a remove from political consequences, just as much as they are at a remove from the people who watch them on the teevee and try to self-actualize through them.
It is a very strange effect celebrity can have on the fans, this King of Comedy thing, where fans start monitoring and over-sharing and over-caring about what these people say and do and think. I mean, it's very simple -- if you're upset over Ellen DeGeneres sitting next to George W. Bush and acting like everything is cool, then stop watching her show, write her a nasty letter. Whatever floats your boat. Maybe it makes her think for a moment how and why she's "friends" with someone like that, but probably not. Again, it's a peculiarity to her vocation -- you train yourself to figure out quickly how to be friends with everyone and anyone.
But realize that that's the extent of it. She doesn't care what you think. She doesn't have to. Maybe next year she'll throw a $50k/plate fundraiser for Warren or whoever, and act like that absolves her. In the meantime, some other nonsense will have cropped up to make the usual suspects muster to their virtual battlements, and pretend one more time that they actually have some agency in the real world.
The personality traits seem by definition to be heightened in the daytime arena, where the fluff is even fluffier, and the goal seems to be to provide solace and affirmation to whatever the audience is stuck spending their afternoon tuning into such a thing. Daytime hosts are the hype people for video wallpaper, essentially. And they do it with the persona of being everyone's friend.
Oprah is the queen of this sort of thing, of course, and she's very good at it. She has cemented herself in the American psyche as a goodwill ambassador, someone whose work ethic and positive attitude has transformed lives.
But she has also inflicted Doctors Oz and Phil on an unsuspecting nation, so there's that. She is tight with Tyler Perry, who poses as a champion for black artistes, while simultaneously building an empire on the backs of non-union contract workers.
So when we all saw Ellen DeGeneres sitting next to ol' Fredo Arbusto at the Cowboys-Packers game last Sunday, one instantly assumed the requisite round of side-taking and tribal affirmation. I think it does say something about Ellen, but it also says -- as these things always do -- so much more about us, and our supposed deep concerns, and how impotent online twitrage is supposed to equal some sort of constructive action or activity.
It seems that most observers, regardless of political persuasion, rate Trump as already an even worse chief executive than Bush, who was already barrel-scrapings with the likes of James Buchanan. And to be sure, it's a neck-and-wattle battle for that low spot.
But a sober assessment of Trump's track record so far, while certainly dismal, will actually compare him slightly more favorably to Bush. Even a cursory recap of the "standout" moments bear that out:
- Lets Dick Cheney pretend to search for a vice-president, before settling on himself. This turns out to be the moment at which the tone for the next eight years would be set.
- A contentious Florida vote count in which Bush's brother and a partisan SCOTUS handed the election to Dubya.
- Passed a huge tax cut that mostly benefited the ultra-wealthy. Sound familiar?
- 9/11, obviously, made all the worse that Dubya had been specifically warned in writing, while on one of his interminable vacations, and he blew it off. A few weeks later, three thousand Americans lost their lives, and the world was upended.
- Started a war with the wrong country to avenge 9/11, his daddy, take your pick. Didn't seem to occur to anyone that if Saddam had really had weapons of mass destruction, he would have used them. Thousands of American troops were killed or grievously wounded, and countless Iraqis were slaughtered and/or displaced, both during the war and in the gruesome civil war that followed. Grinning torturers, gardens of limbs and torsos, people murdered with a power drill through the face.
- Campaigned in 2004 by slandering his opponent. Imagine the kind of balls it takes for Bush and Cheney, with nine fucking deferments between them, to impugn the record of a decorated combat veteran. Maybe Ellen doesn't remember the purple band-aids at the GOP convention, but some of us still do.
- Won the 2004 election by stealing Ohio, with some help from Ken Blackwell and the good folks at Diebold. Got the rubes out in full force by putting anti-gay marriage measures on the ballot in all the swing states, which apparently doesn't trouble DeGeneres' conscience.
- Fucked the dog royally when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans (DeGeneres' hometown) and killed 1,800 people, and his FEMA director turned out to be a dick-thumbing chump just like himself.
- Finally met his Waterloo when he decided to go after Social Security, and the Democrats (led by Pelosi) fought back and won.
- The economy started sinking in late 2007, and Bush, out of answers and unwilling to trouble his paymasters, dithered and golfed until the stock market finally plummeted to 6,800 and the disaster was well under way. Right up to the moment that Barack Obama kicked the living shit out of the McCain-Palin ticket, Bush thumbed his dick some more and made it plain to all that he had been in way over his head from day one.
Bush has been allowed to go through some "rehabilitation" to his image because Americans are forgetful, heedless, and are always hesitant to hold their "betters" responsible for the horrors they commit or enable. And Bush has cultivated this image as more of an amiable doofus than a boorish, philandering con man like Trump.
But Bush is a dick all the same, setting aside the fake-cowboy pose and trotting out his natural to-the-manor-born attitude whenever challenged on anything. When the Iraq War started getting hairy, he dared them to bring it on, and seemed surprised when they in fact brought it. His response was to play dress-up and pretend to land a fighter on an aircraft carrier and drop a huge celebratory banner. He seemed to think that looking out the window of Air Force One over the the flooded remains of the Ninth Ward showed sufficiently that he really, truly cared.
When I talk about how Trump will almost certainly never be held fully or even partially accountable for his crimes, because we almost never do that to the wealthy and powerful, it's really George W. Bush who serves as the prime example in this era of that very principle. Read the above list of bullet points again, keeping in mind that it's been a long time, and I probably forgot a lot of other nasty shit. What price at all has Bush paid for any of it? Didn't cost him a day in jail or a dollar out of pocket. Probably never lost a wink of sleep at any point in time. Why, he's friends with America's Friend, Ellen DeGeneres!
And it's not like he hasn't done anything since he left office -- Bush resurfaced last year to do some behind-the-scenes arm-twisting for one Brett "Boof" Kavanaugh, aka Rapebro McGambledrunk. The Republicons would have pushed through some monster or other regardless, but Kavanaugh's pedigree is special -- helped Kenny Boy Starr impeach Bill Clinton over a blowjob, then served as Dubya's minion for several years, so he knows where all the bodies and documents are buried, and Bush figured he owed him one. That was just last year.
I bet you if you asked Ellen how she feels about Trump, even in public, she probably would indicate a high degree of disfavor, if not outright disgust. I'm sure she'd be even more candid in private, about the way he treats people and talks to them and about them, about the abuse of refugees, many of them children, and about the hypocritical evangelicals who openly support a morally bankrupt scumbag because he gives them their best chance to impose a theocracy on a nation that is less and less likely to to abide by that nonsense with each passing year. About anything and everything the man does and says, because it's irrefutable at this point that he's a pustulent pile of shit who is entirely unfit for the office he inhabits.
And yet. The Ellen-Dubya moment took place in the owner's box after all; Ellen had been invited by Charlotte Jones, daughter of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who contributed one million dollars to Trump's inaugural, and likely more on the side to the campaigns and down-ticket support.
Most of us out in peon-land make these little daily micro-decisions about which of our friends and relatives we're willing to discuss politics and current events with, whatever side they land on. Many people have unfortunately had to make tough decisions to stop talking even to their parents, because they can't listen to the incoherent support for an incoherent yabbo one more blessed minute.
But that is all at arm's length; none of us has any sort of direct contact with the people who actually make the decisions. We're not going to find ourselves sitting next to the Botcher of Baghdad in the owner's box anytime soon.
I don't expect Ellen DeGeneres to make a scene or pop him upside the head or whatever. I don't expect anything at all from her, or from anyone in her position. I'm sure they didn't discuss anything political at all; by their very status of power and wealth and cultural influence, neither Ellen DeGeneres nor George W. Bush really need to worry about politics at all. The decisions made by Fuckface Von Clownstick or Boof O'Kavanaugh will not affect either of them in the slightest. They are at a remove from political consequences, just as much as they are at a remove from the people who watch them on the teevee and try to self-actualize through them.
It is a very strange effect celebrity can have on the fans, this King of Comedy thing, where fans start monitoring and over-sharing and over-caring about what these people say and do and think. I mean, it's very simple -- if you're upset over Ellen DeGeneres sitting next to George W. Bush and acting like everything is cool, then stop watching her show, write her a nasty letter. Whatever floats your boat. Maybe it makes her think for a moment how and why she's "friends" with someone like that, but probably not. Again, it's a peculiarity to her vocation -- you train yourself to figure out quickly how to be friends with everyone and anyone.
But realize that that's the extent of it. She doesn't care what you think. She doesn't have to. Maybe next year she'll throw a $50k/plate fundraiser for Warren or whoever, and act like that absolves her. In the meantime, some other nonsense will have cropped up to make the usual suspects muster to their virtual battlements, and pretend one more time that they actually have some agency in the real world.
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